Month: January 2018

It occurred to me today that if I’m going to build a game that I expect other people to play, that they’re going to have to log in to… I’m going to need an SSL certificate.

That’s down the road, of course, but it would be foolish to have any data transferring between individuals and my site without using the HTTPS protocol.

That’s not the only complexity. I was thinking about how to best go about a registration/login process and it dawned on me — I need to figure out password hashing, salting and that kind of stuff. I already know stuff like “md5 is bad” and we used bcrypt in my PHP II class, in conjunction with the password_hash function which (when using PHP 7, which I am) adds a salt. But is that going to be enough? My reading suggests yes, but it’s still not fully solidified in my head, so more reading is required.

Additionally, password resets! My reading recommends a one-time, short-expiry token to allow people to log in from the email sent out to them. While I think I know how to pull that off, thanks to PHP II, I suspect this is going to be a pain. Still, I want to make certain that people’s accounts aren’t easily compromised, so I’m inclined to spend more time than less when it comes to this kind of thing. And I’ll need more time because all of this is also still fuzzy in my head.

Still, in order to make any kind of forward progress in terms of gameplay, I need to make sure I have a login functioning properly, even if I don’t do a registration yet and just populate the user table with a couple of user accounts when I spin up my Docker containers. That means I definitely need to get the password hashing stuff figured out and understood properly before I implement something. Then, maybe I can move forward in the rest of things.

I knew this was going to be a hell of a big project to undertake. I may have underestimated it a little bit. Still, all of this learning is pretty great. More of it to come, clearly.

I was planning all kinds of things out (oh god, the things I’m going to have to do!) and I suddenly was consumed, paralyzed, with this fear: what if I can’t even do the basic stuff I think I know how to do???

For me, the basic stuff is the questions and answers of the trivia portion of the game, which will be the majority of it. While I was thinking about the game itself, I was like “yeah, sure, I know how to pull a single row from a database!” and “yeah, sure, I know how to pull something from the resulting array!” and “pfft, how hard could it be to make it a random question?”

So I decided to dive into it. It’ll all need to be rewritten, of course, because it needs to be built within the game’s framework and right now it exists on a trivia-test.php page (and a private GitHub repo, thank you for loving students like you do!), so it’s messy. But it works. I can randomly pull out a row from the question database. And I can display the question to the user. And I can take the user input and transpose it all to lowercase, then match that to the answer in the database (which is all lowercase) and I do that because, that way, OTTAWA, Ottawa, OtTaWa and ottawa are all valid answers to the question of What is the capital city of Canada?

So I can do this. I can actually do this. And man, that’s super exciting.

I’m still working on the narrative for the story (my friend Lisa is helping me). I’m also still working on the gameplay itself, since it’s still kind of fuzzy, and I’m picking my friend Andrew’s brain about that, since he has probably played more games than anyone else I’ve ever met. My brother insists there be a fishing component to the game and it does make sense, so I’m thinking that there will be a side-quest to level your fishing skill and such. My brother’s going to help me with ideas for how that should go, too.

The coolest part of this so far, apart from realized I can do this, has been figuring out how to organize the databases. I really liked SQL when I took it last winter, and I enjoyed using it in Java class and through PHP. I am not, by any means, an expert, but I really kind of dig SQL. I’m more comfortable on the command line, owing to how I learned, I guess. It’s fun. It’s cool to be able to use Docker to build my database when I restart my environment and I love being able to basically ssh into the container on the gitbash command line and test stuff in there. It’s fun and challenging. Will my alter table command work? Will this command retrieve what I need it to? It’s awesome when it does.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Just wanted to be like yeahhhhhh! More to come, I’m sure.

Oh, hello! Didn’t expect to see me so early in the new year, did you? It’s only been about five weeks since my last post, so I know, this is weird. 😉

I passed PHP II. Not only that, I kind of did pretty well. I nailed a bunch of stuff on my final project and am still feeling pretty good about that. I saw The Last Jedi with my brother and his friend A on December 15th. Afterwards, we stopped in at our parents’ house, where my brother would have dinner with them and his wife and the two kids, while I… had to go home and code until my fingers bled. So I bounced my youngest nephew on my knee for a bit, squeezed the eldest in a hug, then headed back home.

It all started to just click for me. I would have passed, if I’d handed things in as they were. But it would have been something like a 65% or something and that would have stuck in my craw. So I was thrilled when things just started to click and I was able to build out a lot of the required functionality that, to that point, hadn’t been working right for me. At the risk of sounding cliché, the force was strong with me that night and I finished the class with an 87%.

So that was a relief, but I also felt like I learned a lot of lasting knowledge in PHP II — and not just PHP stuff, either. We’re talking stuff like gitbash, git, Docker, containers, APIs, JSON, all kinds of stuff. It’s pretty cool and I’m so glad I learned that along with the PHP stuff I learned.

And now, JavaScript & AJAX has begun.

Once I’m done with this, by the end of March, I’ll have my Diploma in Web Programming. That represents 260 hours of class alone. I don’t even want to think about how many hours I’ve slaved over this material outside of class, but it was easily as much time in class for each — if not more, especially in the case of Java. So we’re looking at about 520 hours, if not more, working through HTML/CSS, SQL, Java, PHP and now JavaScript and AJAX.

I can’t wait to be done and reclaim any portion of my free time again. 😉

And speaking of free time, I have a crazy idea.

I spent a lot of time playing on the computer as a kid. A lot. Not a lot playing triple-A games or first-person shooters or whatever (although there were a ton of games from Sierra and such, of course). No, what I spent probably way too much time doing as a kid was calling in to local Bulletin Board Systems and writing on message boards and playing online games. I spent what must be years of my life playing Trade Wars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon, which were two of the most popular BBS door games that existed.

Another one I loved was written by a friend of mine. It was called Sky Mountain. The goal was to climb to the peak of the mountain, at 241,000 feet, but you had to mind the Sky Lord and the other climbers on the mountain. The way you climbed the mountain was by answering trivia questions. (Or was that how you gained health? Magic? Whatever, trivia questions were vital.)

So I’m going to take my neophyte PHP skillz and create a web-based game. Details are very fuzzy right now, but I’m planning on a game that harkens back to Sky Mountain in that it has a lot of trivia in it, which will, naturally, be vital to game progression. I’m hoping to have over 4000 questions to start with, in a ton of categories, and I also hope to have a reasonable mechanism to prevent duplicate questions (outside of just having a metric assload of questions to draw from). We’ll see how that goes, since, you know, I’m going to write all these questions myself. While I’m sure that there are open-source trivia databases out there, if this is my game, it’s going to be my game, at least for the content. Some of the questions will be easy to come up with — periodic table stuff, for example, or capital cities. Stuff about geography, music, religion? All a little more difficult.

So that’s my plan for basically the rest of the year. My goal is to have a working beta by late September. Of course, I can’t dedicate much time to it right now because of class, and I do have a full-time job (which I love) and I do have at least a couple of trips happening this year, plus there’s National Novel Writing Month in November… It’s going to be challenging for sure, but I’m really looking forward to taking all the stuff I’ve learned (and will be shortly learning) and incorporating it into a real, actual project.